Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) (3 page)

“Did you call the police?” I asked. My side was really starting to hurt.
 

“I have to call an ambulance!” she yelled. Anne was really sliding into hysteria now, with tears washing all over her face and her eyes scrunched up.
 

“An ambulance can wait. Call the—”
 

“You’re
bleeding
!”

As soon as she said it, I tasted copper in my mouth. My fingers touched the corner of my lips and came away red. Dammit, I was bleeding. My teeth felt secure, though—it was probably a cut on the inside of my mouth. I wouldn’t be able to drink my coffee hot for a few days.

Then I felt the trickle on my forehead and reached up to feel wetness. My fingertips were covered in a decent amount of blood.

“Don’t worry,” I said. My words began to slur and I had to concentrate to keep using the right accent. Now would be a very bad time to start sounding like someone from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. “Head wounds always bleed the worst.”

“Not
that
,” she screamed, and then she pointed to my ribs. “
There
.”
 

A large red spot had bloomed on the gray fabric of my sweater.
 

I licked my lips. “Stevie’s going to murder me if I ruin my clothes.”

Then I stopped talking.

EVENTUALLY THE PARAMEDICS cut the sweater off, so I no longer worried about whether Stevie would complain about the stains. When they lifted me out of Anne’s car, the passenger seat was painted with blood. I had enough awareness of what was going on to feel guilty about that.

One of the paramedics was white and the other one was black and I still lost track of who was doing what. One of them gave me a few stitches in the side before the ambulance took me to a hospital. I told them I’d rather be treated in the Ralph’s parking lot, because frankly I’d had worse injuries that I’d left untreated and I’d rather not deal with hospitals. But no, they wanted to get x-rays of my side, because something, maybe a rough blade I hadn’t even seen in Roger’s hands, had given me a serious slice over my left ribs.
 

Anne had become hysterical at the sight of blood. Not being able to do anything while the paramedics worked on me made her incoherent. When she wasn’t allowed to come with me in the ambulance, she was crying so much I had to touch her hand to get her attention. I told her I’d text her to tell her what hospital I was at, and did she have anyone who could come get her to drive her home? For some reason, saying that made her completely lose it, so today’s lesson was that Anne could not deal with blood and violence. As my stretcher went into the ambulance, a police officer introduced himself and asked for a statement. My final words to Anne were, “Call your lawyer before saying anything, you idiot,” but she didn’t seem to hear me. Or perhaps I wasn’t saying them very well.

I took my own advice to heart and called my lawyer from the ambulance. He said he’d come find me. Which meant, he was coming to take care of me.

I love my lawyer. Not in a sexual way. That would just mess up what was a stunningly useful relationship for me.

Obviously, I didn’t call Stevie. If I thought Anne was on the verge of madness about the fight and my injuries, my sister Stevie would have immediately entered a comatose state, reversible only by divine intervention. She had never dealt with my more serious altercations well, and there have been a fair number that have driven her into hysterics over the years. The moment she heard my mission to help Anne with a story had ended in a fight that landed me in the hospital, she would demand my promise to stay home with her forever and ever, only the two of us, where it was safe.

Or some definition of safe, at any rate. After all, not too long ago someone had tried to kill me at the fabulous Pacific Palisades estate where we lived. I’ve inspired that sort of reaction a few times too many in my life.

At the hospital, the residents cleaned me up, x-rayed me, and did a CAT scan to see if any of the blows to my head had had any serious effect. The whole time, a uniformed cop kept telling them loudly, within my earshot, that he needed to take my statement on this matter right now.
 

I wondered why my little squabble with Roger Sabo might be so important he needed to talk to me right now, before I finished receiving a medical examination.

My lawyer, Nathaniel Ross, finally showed up and told the cop to leave me the hell alone until such time as I was ready to talk. Which on Nathaniel’s calendar would be penciled in under “never.” That made the police officer mad. I didn’t care. The Vicodin was starting to kick in and my mood began to show significant improvement. The wonders of narcotics.

Nathaniel closed the curtains around my bed for a modicum of privacy as we spoke. We both knew the officer was standing right outside—the side of his black shoe was clearly visible. He rolled his eyes, as if to say,
Can you believe this guy?

I hadn’t felt much like smiling since I’d arrived at the hospital, but my lawyer’s arrival cheered me up immensely.

Nathaniel didn’t have the drop-dead good looks so many people in Los Angeles do—he was in his late thirties, and his blond hair was thinning on top, and his face wasn’t completely symmetrical. If we met at a party I’d have passed him over and moved on to see who else was there. But he was comfortable staring me directly in the eyes, without flirtation or menace or lust or any of the usual emotions I’ve gotten from men over the years, and his directness was both reassuring and attractive.
 

Nathaniel Ross was incredibly secure in how good a job he was doing being the one and only Nathaniel Ross.

My flirtations with him were merely perfunctory. Our relationship was fine as it was, and he never flirted back, which was for the best. And it was comforting having someone take care of me for once, even if it was only because at the moment I couldn’t take care of myself.
 

He leaned close to me so he could whisper. “What the fuck happened this time, Drusilla?”

“You should see the other guy,” I whispered back.
 

“If you want to press charges, we need to do it as soon as possible. However, circumstances being what they are....”

I knew what he meant.

On the one hand, Roger Sabo was an abusive fuck who deserved absolutely everything I could hit him with, physically and legally. He had assaulted me. He’d thrown Courtney across the room like a rag doll. He was so comfortable doing it, he’d clearly done it before. On top of all that, he was a terrible conversationalist.
 

There was nothing about Roger Sabo I didn’t hate.

On the other hand, filing charges could mean publicity, and publicity meant exposure. I was quite possibly the only person in Los Angeles who didn’t want her face on the evening news. While trapped in the City of Angels, I had exactly one job to do: avoid attention.
 

“I’m high right now. I’ll make a bad decision, no matter what I do.”

He nodded. He was well aware of the sort of restrictions I chafed under. As long as I lived here under the name of Drusilla Thorne, Nathaniel Ross was my prison warden.
 

At least I wasn’t the one paying his hourly rate.
 

I motioned him closer. “Will you call Stevie for me?”

“And tell her what?”
 

Good question. I smiled. “Tell her I met a man in a motel this afternoon and we got busy.”
 

Nathaniel snorted under his breath as he shook his head. “Okay. I’ll think of something. Something better than that.”

“Thank you.” I patted his hand. “You take such good care of me. I should marry someone like you. My stepfather would be thrilled.”

Nathaniel dragged his hand away from mine.

Since I wasn’t up to much physical movement, I had to settle for mentally slapping myself for saying something so stupid.

No, not the marriage proposal. That didn’t even rate on the idiocy scale compared to the other thing.

Did I say
stepfather
out loud? Nathaniel was a smart guy. He had to have figured out the relationship between Roberto Montesinos and me, but no one was supposed to acknowledge it. Especially as Roberto Montesinos’s stepdaughter was alive and well and probably partying in South Beach this weekend.
 

“What I mean is—”

Nathaniel stood up. “The dope’s kicking in. Don’t say another word. To anyone. At all. I mean it.”
 

The curtain was pulled to the side and one of the residents walked in. “How are we doing?” she asked.
 

Had I seen her before during my visit? I had no idea. The drugs the hospital had put me on were magnificent.

Now, if Roger had offered me some of these without the accompanying beating, I might have been interested.

“Your tests are clear. No internal bleeding. No concussion.”
 

Nathaniel folded his arms. “Do you need to keep her here?”
 

The resident shook her head. “We can keep her here overnight, but—”

“What do I need to do to check her out?” Nathaniel said.
 

The resident handed him a couple of forms. “Here’s her prescriptions.”

A diminutive brown woman in a form-fitting blue skirt suit and holding a thin plastic shopping bag walked up to my bed. Her kitten heels clicked against the white vinyl floors with a dancer’s rhythm. Carmela Tanner, Nathaniel’s scarily effective assistant.

“Hello, Ms. Thorne,” she said. She put the bag on a chair near Nathaniel and pulled a camera out of it. Still in the bag was a set of clothes. “How are you feeling?”

“I’ve been worse,” I slurred.

Nathaniel said, “We need to document what happened if we’re going to file.”

Carmela took a set of photos of the worst of it—the cut on my side, the bruise on my stomach, the side of my face. She checked them on the screen and then nodded.
 

Nathaniel took a powder blue, oversized t-shirt and matching sweatpants out of the bag and tore the tags off. He tossed the clothes to the foot of the bed. “I’ll get your pills from the pharmacy.”

He disappeared into the hospital while two nurses prepared me to go home. They checked all my bandages and helped me dress. The clothes were soft and loose and still irritated my skin next to the dressings.
 

“You ready to go?” one nurse asked me.
 

I nodded.
 

An orderly wheeled me into the elevator and took me downstairs to the loading area, where Nathaniel and his Mercedes sedan were waiting for me.
 

He helped me put the seatbelt on.
 

“He’s going to hear about this, isn’t he?” I whispered.

No need to explain who I meant.
 

Nathaniel put on his turn signal. “He pays my invoices. Remember that.”

*
 
*
 
*

Stevie freaked out when she saw me. It’s not that hard to predict my sister’s reactions in certain circumstances, and my ending up in the hospital was one.

By the time Nathaniel got me home, it was seven o’clock. We drove through the electric gates installed only two months before. Gary had had the gates installed after someone tried to kill me—actually, more than one person had made the attempt, because I’m quite the overachiever. Nathaniel swung his car around the fountain in the center of the cobblestoned courtyard in front of the Tuscan-style mansion and parked next to Anne’s car.
 

The doors to the garage building were closed, which meant Gary was here, too. Unless he’d taken the car service to the movie set that morning, in which case he wasn’t back yet and maybe hadn’t heard what had happened to me. Zeus almighty, I was so disoriented I couldn’t even remember where Gary was supposed to be that day. One of the reasons Stevie and I had this cushy little setup living at Gary’s house was that one of my jobs was to take care of him and know where he was at all times. If I messed that up, my life would be more difficult than it already was. Dammit.

My lawyer helped me out of the car as the front door opened and Stevie came running out of it, still wearing her favorite pink-and-purple floral apron. While waiting for me to come home, my sister had channeled her energies into whipping up one of her seven-course meals. “Dru!” she yelled.
 

Anne appeared behind her. She did not come running across the courtyard.

When my sister got close I held up one hand. “Don’t hug me,” I told her. She had a nasty tendency to hang on to me like a cobra when she needed reassurance.

She flopped her arms out a few times. I gave her a quick, loose hug, careful to keep her to my right side, which hurt a hell of a lot less than my left. It wasn’t easy: my sister is twenty centimeters shorter than I am. We make an odd pair for hugging.
 

When she pulled away, she was saying, “Are you okay?” over and over again. It sounded like an incantation.

I nodded. “I’m fine. They wouldn’t have let me out of hospital if I weren’t.”

“Anne told me....” Her voice cracked. “She told me what happened.”

I made a mental note to make Anne understand she should not tell Stevie things. Ever. I put my hands on Stevie’s shoulders and stared at her. “Ask Nathaniel. He was there when they let me go. He knows precisely what they said.”

We turned to look at him.
 

He gave me an absolutely flat look before nodding. “Clean bill of health. Just...you know. Take it easy.” He held out my bag of prescription medications. “I’ll give you a call and check in.”

Stevie took the drugs from him. Because she knew me all too well. “Please join us for dinner. There’s plenty.”

“My sister likes to prepare for any uninvited guests who might join us,” I said. “For instance, the Russian Army.”

Nathaniel’s quick smile did not show his teeth. “I have heard about your cooking. But I can’t.”

“Sweetie, he’s been sitting at the hospital all afternoon with me. And the man doesn’t get paid ten thousand dollars an hour to sit in hospitals.”